The Liège CHU (University Hospital Centre) has recently made a move which is a first for Wallonia: it is bringing all of its support services together on a common site. This large scale logistics operation comes with a fiscal element which also represents a precedent… and may give ideas to others.

Jean Codognotto, director of the logistics services for Liège CHU, insists on one detail: “This is ‘exteriorisation’ and not externalisation. This is not an outsourcing operation but a regrouping, centralising all of our services, stocks and personnel onto a dedicated site outside of the hospital and strategically located with regard to our various installations”.

Cramped in premises too ‘prime’ for this useIt is the pressure of a growing need for space which convinced the heads of the logistics services of the CHU to look for innovative external solutions: “Over time, we had increased the number of beds, centralised at Sart-Tilman the stocks and the personnel required for 6 sites, felt the effects of the growth in activities and the increase in recourse to disposable items, all of this in the same premises as in 1987 and without being able to ‘push back the walls’. We were also suffering from the pressure of other medical and pharmaceutical services which needed more space, which would easily have used these adjoining areas, which had become too ‘prime’ for storage alone.Another decisive factor then became apparent: the strategic development plan of the CHU clearly demonstrated the need for further premises for medical activities, particularly in terms of clean rooms and of pharmaceutical robots for the individualised preparation of prescriptions. It was quite obvious – we had to move”.